Over the weekend, the Pitt football team opened its 2009 season in impressive style with an… Over the weekend, the Pitt football team opened its 2009 season in impressive style with an overwhelming victory over the Youngstown State Penguins 38-3. Surely, a victory of that magnitude should help ease any concern or skepticism that Pitt students and fans might have about the 2009 season.

Coming into this college football season, I was very skeptical about the potential success of the Panthers, given the departures of several significant players — like LeSean McCoy and Scott McKillop. However, the Panthers play on the field Saturday afternoon quickly made me rethink my predisposed notions about this year’s squad. The dynamic play of freshman running back Dion Lewis almost made me forget about last year’s star running back, and the Pitt defense wreaked havoc on the clearly overmatched Penguins. Even backup quarterback Tino Sunseri looked impressive in his brief outing this past weekend.

On Sunday, however, the impressive and, for many Pitt fans, reassuring, play of the Panthers was overshadowed by a gesture directed at notoriously inconsistent quarterback Bill Stull. The Heinz Field crowd booed Stull loudly on the second drive of the game after consecutive incomplete passes, and later again in the 3rd quarter. Even more, when Sunseri entered the game, he got a cheer so loud one might have thought he was Dan Marino, or that someone accidentally played “Sweet Caroline” too early.

On Post-Gazette sports columnist Bob Smizik’s blog on Sunday, Smizik took serious offense to the crowd’s derision of Stull, calling it both “ugly and mean-spirited.” Smizik’s colleague at the Post-Gazette, Ron Cook, described the boos as simply pathetic. Cook’s sentiments were reiterated by Tribune-Review columnist Joe Starkey, who went so far as to say that the booing “is pathetic and needs to stop.”

Perhaps after my four years as a Pitt student, I am still not acclimated enough with the sports culture in the Pittsburgh region to understand these sentiments. But to cast outrage over an incident as common and insignificant as fans booing poor performance on the field of play is itself an outrage.

Growing up in the shadows of New York City, I was, and am struggling to continue, to cheer heartily for the New York Knicks, Jets and Mets. It does not take an avid sports fan to know that those franchises have not had the same levels of success as the Penguins or Steelers. Seventeen consecutive losing seasons is one feat the Mets have yet to conquer, though.

Enduring such painful hardship on the football field, basketball court and baseball diamond breeds fans to rain boos on athletes at virtually every moment of every game. The Mets collapsing two out of the last three years in September only to watch the hated Philadelphia Phillies go on and win the World Series, Doug Brien missing two potential game-winning field goals to send the Jets to the 2004 AFC Championship Game, the entire operation of the Knicks franchise — all of these things have virtually embedded the art of booing in my DNA.

Let us not forgot recent Pitt football history, either. The 2008 Pitt football season was met by high expectations and resulted in less-than-stellar results, capped off by the disastrous Sun Bowl in which the Panthers lost to Oregon State 3-0 — a loss that can be attributed to Stull’s disastrously poor play, among other things.

This year, much like many of the recent seasons in Pitt football, is one marked by high expectations. In a down year for the Big East, Pitt has enough talent to finally take the conference crown, which would be its first since 2004. The combination of high expectations and Stull’s inconsistent and sometimes costly play was merely a powder keg that finally burst.

Over the course of Dave Wannstedt’s tenure as head coach of the Pitt football team, he has consistently produced top-25 recruiting classes. Year after year, the Pitt football program is replenished with new and exciting young talent. Yet year after year, the Panther faithful have been let down by poor results.

The mounted frustration and let downs of past seasons needed to be heard. It is unfortunate that Stull bore the beating of the Panther faithful, but it was not uncalled for. The Panther fans were not wrong in booing Stull. The gesture might have been a bit premature but far from unjustified.